Adania Shibli

[10] Further, she has expanded her work to include novels, plays, short stories and narrative essays, published in several languages in anthologies, art books and literary and cultural magazines.

[7] Her non-fiction works include the art book Dispositions (Ramallah: Qattan) and a collection of essays called A Journey of Ideas Across: In Dialogue with Edward Said (Berlin: HKW).

[11] In a December 2020 interview with cultural journalist Claudia Steinberg, Shibli talked about the recently published English translation by Elisabeth Jaquette of her novel Minor Detail, her life in Germany and the unequal relationship between Palestinians and Israelis:[12] For me, this situation is never about Jewishness.

[14] She was named as one of the Beirut39, a group of 39 Arab writers under the age of 40 chosen through a contest organized by Banipal magazine and the Hay Festival.

[24] In his article of 13 October in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, literary scholar and journalist Paul Ingendaay referred to an interview with Shibli that he had already conducted in 2022 on the occasion of the German publication of her novel.

From this, Ingendaay quotes Shibli's statements as a writer who is interested in the literary representation of topics such as control and fear of a person, thereby enabling the author and reader to gain hidden insights about themselves.

Instead, she insisted on appreciating her novel Minor Detail — and fiction writing more generally — as a place for thinking about language, place, and identity, which always depends on who is reading it.”[25] On the other hand, the Tageszeitung newspaper on 11 October quoted journalist Ulrich Noller, who claimed that the novel served antisemitic narratives.

[26] In November 2023, the Hamburg Regional Court rejected Shibli's demand to prohibit critical statements in the Tageszeitung article about her novel.

The court ruled that these statements were covered as an expression of freedom of speech, and decided that literary criticism was entitled to make harsh judgments, since the article referred to the content of the book, not to the author's beliefs.

[27] Prompted by the announced cancellation of the award, more than 1000 authors and intellectuals, including Colm Tóibín, Ian McEwan, Anne Enright, Hisham Matar, Kamila Shamsie, William Dalrymple as well as Nobel Prize winners Abdulrazak Gurnah, Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk, criticized the Frankfurt Book Fair and wrote in an open letter that the Book Fair had “a responsibility to be creating spaces for Palestinian writers to share their thoughts, feelings, reflections on literature through these terrible, cruel times, not shutting them down”.

Worldwide Reading for Ashraf Fayadh on 14 January 2016 at Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin . Shibli appears second from the right.